Foto
Not so long ago, I fell over a tweet from a company called Foto, and it immediately caught my attention and made me think.
When I started out as photographer, Instagram was the first app I opened when I wanted the world to see my latest work. I could get hours of inspiration from scrolling my feed and I could return to my feed whenever I wanted. I enjoyed it. In my opinion it was nearly the perfect app for a photographer.
But not so much today.
When I open up Instagram today, scroll through the endless amounts of videos, recommendations and ads, and try to post a photograph — nothing. I feel like nobody is seeing my posts, my engagement is close to gone and it makes me feel miserable. Its demotivating and it has made me question my talent, and my professional career. As an app for inspiration, connecting and building a network, it is still great but I feel like I am carrying a completely different app in my pocket, that I downloaded many years ago. In terms of showing my work it is almost worthless.
I feel that the times have changed and we need a new, better and “pure” app for photographers. There are of course other apps and places online to show your work but none has hit the spot yet if you ask me. Personally I am still using Instagram, as most of my followers are there and I have started to like Twitter again.
If only one would make that “perfect” photo app, you could potentially rule the photography world and have it in the palm of your hand.
Literally.
Luckily, earlier this year, after a true shitstorm of another world from photographers alike, Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, admitted that they had “gone too far into video” and pulled back on some of their upcoming updates. A small victory for the photography community, winning some points but the ship is still sinking Im afraid.
We are onboard the Titanic and we have to find a lifeboat.
That’s where Foto hopefully, will rescue us all.
Foto was founded by Michael Howard, and from what I am seeing from his daily updates on Twitter, he is doing an incredible job building Foto.
I recently had the opportunity to interview Michael.
What is your backstory?
I grew up in southwest Missouri. It wasn’t until college that I discovered photography and knew I wanted to pursue it as my career. I graduated from Missouri State University with a BFA in Photography in 2002. I freelanced as a photographer from 2002 - 2016. In 2012, I started a company called MUSEA. It was initially a software company that was an online gallery system for professional photographers, but we ended up pivoting the company in 2014 to archival printing. MUSEA has grown for eight straight years and serves professional photographers and artists across the United States. In January, we expanded into a new 4,000 sq ft facility.
Photography has been my professional focus for the last 25 years, and I’ve worked with software developers for the previous ten years. At this point in my life, I see myself more as an entrepreneur that builds companies to help photographers and artists have sustainable careers.
What is Foto?
I had the initial idea for Foto in 2018, but I knew it wasn’t a great time to launch a new image-sharing app due to Instagram’s popularity. People were not as dissatisfied with Instagram as they are these days. In August 2021, when Instagram announced they were no longer a photo-sharing app, I knew it was time to look at Foto again more seriously. During that time, I started writing down many ideas for what Foto could become by rethinking how a new platform can help people build a career for themselves in the long term. The creator economy should be built around tools that empower artists and businesses, not use their data and audiences to bombard them with advertising. The attention disruption model is dying, but what is coming next isn’t entirely clear yet.
Anyway, in early August 2022, I decided to go for it and publicly announce that we are building Foto.
Now let me get to what Foto is.
Foto is going to be two things.
The first thing is a beautiful social app that is image-centric, where people can build and remain in control of their audience.
The second thing is a new concept for an online database for images. This is the longer-term vision, which is that Foto will be your central online archive for your work with powerful search features, copyright protection, licensing, and digital authentication.
We are building the social application first, and we’ll be giving people within the US the chance to invest in Foto in the coming months. We plan to do an equity crowdfunding campaign so anyone can become a shareholder for as little as $100.
Often startups turn to accredited investors and venture capitalist firms, but we want Foto to be funded more democratically. We believe this will be healthier for the company long term, and it will allow us to focus on serving our users directly versus serving Silicon Valley and their interests.
How do you see Foto will change the photo world, and what makes it stand out from other photography apps?
Ok, let’s talk about the problems we see online and then specific ways we plan to help solve those problems.
Long-term, we see Foto putting the power back in the creators’ hands. Right now, everyone is being forced to play the game of big tech and its ever-changing algorithms.
We live in a world where people have spent a decade building their audience and business on social media platforms without actually owning their audience. People are renting their audience. Meta (Instagram/Facebook) can delete all of that work overnight. If you get banned for anything, then you may never get that back. Instagram barely has a customer support center to help people get their accounts back, answer questions, or inform them of why they got banned in the first place.
Social Media in its current form is broken and doesn’t serve artists or businesses very well. It’s not uncommon for people to only have 1-5% of their followers see their content. Everyone is forced to pay big advertising dollars to reach their audience, so while social media feels free, it’s actually very expensive.
On top of all of this, these sites strip metadata from the images. They aren’t doing anything to protect the creator’s copyright, usage, and licensing. Their monetization structure incentivizes only quick, entertainment content. This shortens attention spans, doesn’t encourage critical thinking, and leads to mental health issues. They only care about you spending as much time in the app as possible. They want your attention, and that’s it. If that means allowing division and drama to occur in the app because it increases ‘in-app time,’ then that is the content that will flourish. It’s dangerous and unhealthy.
On top of that, being on social media right now is exhausting. I don’t know anyone that enjoys it at this point. It’s a necessary evil, and frankly, that’s a shitty experience.
With Foto, we want to create a place that allows people to see the posts of people they follow, to build and monetize their audience, and to serve as the central online archive for images.
Let’s talk about some of the practical differences that Foto will have.
Foto will be free for everyone, but it will also be free of advertising.
Our monetization concept isn’t through ads, it’s through providing professional tools for ‘pro’ accounts that require a $10 monthly fee to unlock.
The initial Pro features we will build over time are Portfolio, Subscriptions, and Shop.
The Portfolio Tab will be where you can show your best, most permanent work. We believe artists shouldn’t be restricted to only the ‘latest’ posts.
The Shop Tab will be where you can sell prints or other products right from Foto without having to leave the app.
The Subscriptions Tab will be for subscriber-only content. This is where creators can create posts, educational resources, and entertainment behind a paywall. We will take a small % of the subscriber fee, and that % will decrease as the creators’ subscriber count grows. This will also allow users to stay within the Foto app instead of switching to something like Patreon.
With Foto, we also want to give users control of their experience. We plan on building tools that help people share posts with the appropriate audience. Say you have an image you want to share only with your family. You should be able to do that with just your family members from your one Foto account versus creating a ‘family account’ and a ‘business account.’
We also know there is a need for people to create lists to help organize all the accounts they follow. It can be very easy to follow hundreds of accounts you have an interest in, but people need to be able to organize all of those accounts into lists. This will allow users to see the content of those they want to check in with more efficiently.
There are a ton of other ideas we have, but the general arc is to create a platform that puts users in control of their social experience and in control of their intellectual property.
Could you show us a preview of Foto and take us through some of its main features?
Sure! I can give you a preview of the MVP (minimal viable product) of Foto. This is what we will be launching first, but it is far from a finished product. We want to launch a simple version of Foto so we can start serving our users and building traction for the platform.
In the main feed and all posts, you’ll be able to upload photos without having them cropped. You’ll be able to like, comment, and eventually ‘reshare’ posts to your feed.
We will not have like or follower counts listed publicly. If you are logged into your account, then you’ll see those metrics, but you won’t see that data listed publicly on other accounts. We hope that taking away some of the metrics from public view will help people engage with posts they like because of the value they get from it, not because something is popular.
Every account will start with a ‘Recent’ feed that shows off what they’ve posted lately, and Pro Accounts can unlock additional tabs like the ‘Portfolio’ section. This gives them a space to show their best work regardless of when that work was created or posted to Foto.
Also, we are rethinking what posts look like. We will give users the ability to make longer posts utilizing content ‘blocks’. For each post, you’ll have to start with an image, but then you can choose between adding another image or a text block. You’ll repeat this process to create longer-form posts. You’ll be able to post several images or do a bunch of text blocks. Ideally, we’d like to see users mix and match images and text to provide insightful content.
Within text blocks, you’ll notice we will be allowing hyperlinks, so you can link out to other places that you want people to visit.
We want posts on Foto to have more of a blog, newsletter, or magazine article feel to them.
We are keeping things simple, and we will build more features over time.
Where do you see Foto in 10 years?
The main thing we want to build Foto into over the next ten years is the most innovative image search database online. We all take so many photos, and we don’t know how to organize them, let alone find images we’ve previously taken easily. Professional photographers often struggle with a long-term archiving system. It’s a lot of work and very complicated. The average person right now isn’t archiving their meaningful family photos. This is a major problem and needs to be simplified.
We want people to be able to find an image they want within seconds by only typing in a few keywords. This will allow a mother to quickly find a family photo that she wants to share or wants to revisit. This will allow a professional artist to look at work from 15 years ago almost instantly. Having a powerful search system allows for countless use cases for having your work be discovered and protected at the same time.
In 10 years, I think Foto will be the place photographers, artists, and image makers will go to preserve their work digitally and to share images with their relevant audiences. Imagine having a single user interface to upload your work online that will record everywhere that image is used online. If a major media outlet wants to license your work, you can do that from Foto and get paid. If someone uses your image without permission, you can see that and take appropriate action.
Perhaps an AI dataset intends to use your image to create a new AI piece of art, then you should be compensated for providing your image as a resource for that AI to pull data from. We want to be the place that is trusted to authenticate if an image was made by a human or AI. We also want to make sure people know if an image they are consuming was digitally altered or if it is free of any content manipulation.
We want Foto to protect creators and for their metadata to travel with their images across the web. This will allow them to monetize the work they put online and to verify where their work is being used.
We hope to be the social online archive for everyone that cares about preserving the images they take.
That’s it for this newsletter!
If you have any suggestions for interviews, features, topics, interesting work or books that I should check out, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Keep shooting and stay safe.
Kim
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That sounds very promising. I think the most interesting question will be how to expand beyond the photo bubble towards a broader, creative audience like graphic designers, illustrators, filmmakers and more. I thought it‘s an interesting concept, but i personally thought that the naming of the platform was a bit too specific, targeted towards photo people only. The same fate that glass had, after the first impression, it was just another 500px with mediocre content. I think expanding to a broader user base if different creative practices could be very beneficial. But great to see that people are actually working on good alternative! Thanks for the effort Michael!
Very insightful view of what's needed in an app for photographers. I saw Foto's tweets but I did not realize until this interview the depth and pertinence of what Michael Howard envisions for Foto.
It adresses the very issues I'm most concerned with: retain ownership, build a reliable and lasting image archive, escape algorithm hell, more articulate posts. Consider me interested!